Thursday, August 8, 2013

Tinfoil Hat Brigade Rides Again!

Jonathan Chait, links (if you must) at site.

The new right-wing book of the moment is American Betrayal, by Diana West, which offers the thesis that American foreign policy under presidents Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower was secretly controlled by the Soviet Union. If this sounds like the sort of tract that would be written by somebody who thinks Joe McCarthy was absolutely right about everything, well, that’s exactly what Diana West does believe. She’s also quite the birther.

But her book has managed to attract quite a bit of support from respectable and semi-respectable outlets on the right. The Heritage Foundation feted West, Amity Shlaes blurbed it, the American Spectator and Daily Caller issued raves, and Breitbart is actually serializing the book.
That pretty much tells you all you need to know.

Blaming the U.S. for provoking Pearl Harbor is the sort of claim that might offend modern conservatives, except that West further argues that America was controlled by the Soviets all along. Likewise, she tells us, the U.S. could have supported anti-Hitler Nazis and ended the war, but didn’t, because its goal was to help the Soviets occupy Eastern Europe. (“The war had to last long enough for the Soviet Army to roll into the heart of Europe on those fleets of Lend-Lease Dodge and Studebaker trucks Uncle Sam had generously provided.”)
...

Our readers may not grasp just what it takes to be called a right-wing kook in Front Page Magazine by Ron Radosh. The bar is high. Radosh himself is quite conservative (he’s called President Obama a socialist). FrontPageMag is … well, suffice to say, its official motto is “Inside Every Liberal Is A Totalitarian Screaming to Get Out” — which is surely more evocative, if less credibility-rendering, than "All the news that’s fit to print." It currently features stories with such headlines as “Islamic Group in America: We’ll Impose Sharia on Christians” and “Seven More Reasons to Impeach Eric Holder.”
Indeed! Being called crazy by the certifiably insane makes you the Bull Goose Loony!

5 comments:

montag said...

Isn't this shit just a rehash of the John Birch vomit that the Koch Bros daddy started?

Gordon said...

Worse. It's NOW.

CAFKIA said...

These days if your last name is West you have a high bar to prove to me you are not a traitorous idiot.

Diana is in no danger of clearing it.

Syrbal/Labrys said...

Nucking Futs doesn't even describe this shit....seems the key to getting published these days is to come up with the batshit craziest idea and then add extra scoops of loony.

Anonymous said...

Ah, c'mon guys. I'm almost kissing 67 years old and I can remember hearing this crap in middle school and high school. Roosevelt knew the Japanese were going to attack and let it happen, Eleanor was actually a mulatto, the entire Roosevelt administration was communist, blah, blah, blah. Same old s... by a new generation of the same old s...heads.

Jay in N.C.